Katherine Koch | Phoenix Staff

Assistant Professor of Spanish Horacio Chiong Rivero teaches to students (including Sam Goodman, Joel Tolliver and Clare Galpern) in a Spanish language class. Rivero may be forced to leave next year if his tenure appeal does not pass.

BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | Published May 1, 2008 — Updated May 21, 2008 00:27

Prompted by the college’s decision to deny tenure to Spanish language and literature professor Horacio Chiong Rivero earlier this semester, a number of students have continued to express their support for the reconsideration of this decision by collecting signatures for a collective letter, as well as chalking on campus. Currently, any review of the original tenure decision is still under consideration by the Department of Modern Languages and Literature.

On Feb. 23, Rivero was informed through e-mail of the decision to deny him tenure. According to Rivero, the e-mail stated that his “continuing presence was perceived as a problem by the department and the college.” A denial of tenure means that a professor has one year left of employment at the college before he/she must leave. Additionally, the e-mail informed Rivero of his options for going through the reconsideration and appeal process.

Immediately, Rivero submitted a letter to the Committee on Promotion and Tenure asking for a reconsideration of the decision to deny him tenure. Because the college does not inform students of which professors have or have not been awarded tenure, Rivero decided to personally notify some of his current and former students of the decision.

“When I did tell them, a lot of the students, there was a lot of reaction on their part,” he said. “Confusion, they were very surprised, in disbelief, and immediately another reaction was ‘Well, is it completely over and can we do anything about it?’ So, at that point, I thanked them profusely for their support … I’m still overwhelmed by it.”

Although Rivero was uncertain as to how the advocacy of students would affect his request for an appeal, several students mobilized in support of Rivero’s presence at the college in an attempt to reverse the tenure decision.

“Personally, Professor Chiong Rivero communicated to me that he hadn’t received tenure,” Diego Garcia-Montufar ’09, one of the student supporters and a previous Writing Associate for one of Rivero’s classes, said. “And my reaction was of complete amazement because I had written a letter for him. I have written letters for a bunch of professors and I thought he was a given, that he would get tenure.”

“I was pretty shocked,” Erin Floyd ’10, another student supporter, said. “I’m taking Spanish IV with him right now. And this is my first class with him and it’s at 8:30 in the morning and he brings so much life to that class. I know I keep telling people this but I actually enjoy going to an 8:30 class.”

“We heard right before Spring Break,” Claire Galpern ’10, another student supporter, said. “Right after Spring Break we wrote a collective letter of support for him and got the e-mails of his current and former students, and trying to ask them if they would want to sign it, and the support that came back was just overwhelming … Then we kind of realized there was just this overwhelming support for him and it made us ask even more why would we let this professor go.”

Within the collective letter, which more than 100 people signed, the students stated their general support for Rivero as their current or previous professor and endorsed the continued presence of Rivero as a tenured professor at the college. (The collective letter was published in the Letters to the Editor section of The Phoenix two issues ago.)

Soon after, various student supporters were active in contributing to the chalkings found around the buildings of Parrish and Kohlberg a few weeks past, as well as the banner of signatures with the statement: “Our vision for Swarthmore 2020 includes Horacio Chiong Rivero as a tenured professor.”

These students also contacted members of Student Council, who in turn sent an e-mail out to all students and several administrators last Monday entitled “An Open Letter Regarding Tenure,” emphasizing the importance of student input in the tenure decision-making process.

After recognizing the necessity of becoming more informed about the tenure process, student supporters drafted a second letter to the provost of the college. They also met with the provost in order to learn more about the details of the procedures contained within the tenure process.

“The second letter was more about the process of tenure, saying that student input should be taken seriously and that pushing for the tenure committee to base its decision on the procedures that it established which are available on the faculty handbook,” Garcia-Montufar said. According to a section of the faculty handbook entitled “Employment and Compensation for Instructional Staff,” the decision to grant tenure to a faculty member is based on three general characteristics: teaching, scholarship and service in the larger community.

Although the handbook stresses the importance of balance between these three characteristics, it also states, “in considering teaching and scholarship together, strong teaching is regarded as the first responsibility of the college.”

According to Provost Constance Hungerford, the first step of the tenure process is conducted by tenured members of the respective department, in this case the Department of Modern Languages and Literature, and involves assembling letters from previous or current students of the faculty member under evaluation, as well as faculty members of the college, both within and outside the respective department, and scholars outside of the college. The students solicited by the department are a mixture of students chosen by the faculty member in evaluation and the chair of the department. This process starts in early October.

When evaluating the file, the department looks at the faculty member in evaluation based upon these three characteristics during the month of December. They make a recommendation based upon consensus that then gets forwarded to the Committee on Promotion and Tenure. “There is not a specific formula, so I can’t say, for example, that student letters count twenty percent and that scholars’ evaluations weight twenty percent, because we really weigh the entire file. We do pay very close attention to the statements from students,” Hungerford said.

The specific members who comprise the committee are different each year, but the President, the Provost, and four tenured faculty members always sit on the committee each year. There are efforts to ensure diversity of gender and discipline on the committee. Similarly, this committee looks at the faculty member’s strength in the context of the characteristics cited in the faculty handbook and makes a final decision, which is forwarded to the Board of Managers. At this point, according to Hungerford, the decision has virtually been made.

“The Board of Managers doesn’t read the file. They really rely on the committee to make the decision,” Hungerford said. “They’re largely going on the recommendation of the president, because the committee is considered to be advisor to the president. I take the decision to the academic affairs committee of the Board and I review the cases quite thoroughly with them so that they are aware of any issue.”

Rivero said that he chose to appeal the denial of his tenure because he believes that he strongly exemplifies all three of the characteristics cited in the handbook.

“What strikes me as interesting is that my tenure profile basically matches the description in the guidebook,” he said. “They found that all three [characteristics were] strong, but my teaching was particularly untouched. The other two were strong and solid … That’s a question that I have been asking a lot … It seems very incongruous, basically, the result from my tenure file and the decision. In my eyes they don’t match, and I think in a lot of people’s minds they don’t match.”

Stephanie Appiah ’10, another student supporter, though away for study abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina this semester, showed her support for Rivero by creating a Facebook group dedicated to the reconsideration of his tenure decision. “He has too many qualities to count,” Appiah said. “This is a kind, caring man who has published several books, sets aside numerous office hours to help troubled students and provides every opportunity to learn better Spanish.”

Although Appiah does not feel that students should be more formally involved in the tenure decision process due to the nature of a student-teacher relationship, she supports the idea of actively supporting specific professors under tenure decision. “As far as I am concerned, and I do not speak for all of the supporters or organizers, this is my specific support for Professor Chiong Rivero,” Appiah said.

“If other professors call upon me to show support, I will do the same. But I do not support unilateral involvement of students in the tenure process, any more so than they are already involved.”

As stated in their second letter, Garcia-Montufar, Floyd and Galpern as well as more than 100 other former and current students realize the complexity of the issue and only hope that their show of support for Rivero allows the college to realize the importance of not only soliciting but counting student input seriously in the tenure decision process.

“I know the interactions between co-workers and life within the department is very important and that influence how effectively the department will work in and of themselves and teach to the best of their ability, but at the same time, if there’s such an overwhelming student support for a certain professor, I think that it would be in the best interest to listen to the students, and listen to their thoughts in support of the professors,” Floyd said.

“A few people have been asking us, ‘well don’t you think every time a professor doesn’t get tenure all their students are making a fuss about it?’” Galpern said. “But what we think is that clearly there’s just huge student support for him, a majority of students who have had him are outraged. If the college is making decisions in the students’ interests really then why would they deny the professor tenure?”

“It’s not just about me; it’s also my students,” Rivero said. “It is because I care so much about them, I’m very committed to my students. I know how much it means to them for my presence to be at the college. They have validated me in that sense, and that is very comforting.”

“The problem is we don’t know what the [interdepartmental] interactions are,” Garcia-Montufar said. “I mean, in the end, my concern is to this particular decision that has been made … But as a whole I think this is an issue that should not only include students of Professor Chiong Rivero but that should concern all the students of Swarthmore and it’s an issue of student input being taken seriously. You know, we all get letters in our lifetime at Swarthmore and we all hope that we are taken seriously. It’s a matter that raises questions that are important to all of us.”

Currently, Rivero is still waiting for the appeals process to be put into motion. The procedure requires that both the department and the committee reread the file in order to revisit any information that may have been overlooked in the initial deliberation. The department will then convene again to produce another recommendation that is subsequently conveyed to the tenure committee. The committee reviews the file again before either confirming its original decision or recommending a reversal.

“If the decision is again negative, and the individual wishes to continue, he or she can appeal and this time a new committee is appointed, but their charge is different. They’re not asked to reread the file and say whether they would have come to the same decision. They’re asked to determine whether there were any procedural irregularities,” Hungerford said.

If the appeals process indicates the presence of any procedural irregularities in the initial proceedings, then the committee defers to the President of the college, who decides how to proceed with the decision, according to Hungerford. “It’s still in process. We’re waiting for the department to read and meet and then we’ll have to get the tenure committee for the same purpose. We’re hoping we can move as promptly as possible. I hope it would be before exams end,” she said.

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